


a study of dressrosa - or how lami made her first friend

by 3rdgymbros



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Lami Is A Heart Pirate, Lami Lives Because I Say So, Mentioned Monkey D. Luffy, Minor Monkey D. Luffy/Trafalgar D. Water Law
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26251942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3rdgymbros/pseuds/3rdgymbros
Summary: “You’re one of my brother’s friends, aren’t you?” It takes Lami a moment to realise that a face is peering into hers with concern. “You're hurt – There are doctors at the palace, you should –”
Relationships: Sabo & Trafalgar D. Water Lami, Trafalgar D. Water Law & Trafalgar D. Water Lami
Comments: 3
Kudos: 42





	a study of dressrosa - or how lami made her first friend

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts for the longest time. I finally decided to finish it and post it. Please leave a review!

Trafalgar D. Water Lami meets Sabo in the ruins of Dressrosa. Half dead from exhaustion, and battered beyond belief, she’s propped herself up against the remains of a wall, focusing on the breath entering and leaving her lungs so that she won’t feel the oppressive urge to break down into hysterical tears. There will be time to cry later, time to mourn the benefactor she’d lost, to celebrate her new-found freedom.

But right now, there’s work to be done. She can feel the pain of the injured, mingling with their joy, the sheer magnitude of their relief, pulsing like a heartbeat, from the whole country.

A sharp pain feels like a knives are buried in her side – _a couple of cracked ribs, she thinks distantly_ – her arms and legs are a mass of small cuts – _non-threatening injuries_ – and she’s sure that she needs to add more pressure to the bandages that she’d hastily wrapped around the bloodied, gaping gash in her midsection. Red stains her once-white muslin sundress. Her blonde hair, now flecked with dried blood, sticks out in spikes.

“You’re one of my brother’s friends, aren’t you?” It takes Lami a moment to realise that a face is peering into hers with concern. “You're hurt – There are doctors at the palace, you should –”

The boy she is talking to is not much older than she is, maybe twenty-two to her twenty. He has blue eyes that dance – one just a shade lighter than the other – a burn scar marring his tanned skin, and is wearing a top hat over his blonde, wavy hair.

For the first time since Doflamingo’s defeat, Lami grins. “I _am_ the doctor,” she says, ignoring the incessant throbbing of her wounds as she stumbles clumsily to her feet, a new-born deer unsteady on her legs. “But you can call me Lami.”

“Sabo.” He answers, and the dimples in his cheeks deepen.

* * *

The walls of the little cabin close in on her and claustrophobia claws at her gut. Lami decides that she needs a sliver of nature, a space of oxygen. She tiptoes out the front door – feeling Nico Robin and Roronoa's too sharp eyes boring into her back – and the night breeze brings to her the scent of earth and flowers. The field is covered in wildflowers. Perhaps they are really weeds of some sort, but they have beautifully fragrant blossoms. The cold chases wishes of sleep from her head and battles the exhaustion to the periphery of her mind.

She isn’t in any condition to fight, not with how wretched and broken her body feels, but the presence approaching is familiar and devoid of any aggression, which is a nice change of pace from being chased about Dressrosa for the bounty on her head. Lami finds herself finally relaxing, her muscles spasming into the dirt.

She manages a smile. "Hello."

"Hey. You're Lami, right?" He flashes his dimples at her again.

Nod. "Yeah. And you're Sabo."

"Yeah. Is my brother inside?"

"Brother?"

"Luffy."

Lami's eyes widen, almost comically, and Sabo laughs. "Yeah, he's sleeping. Do you want me to –"

"No!" Sabo says, shaking his head. His tone is firm, inarguable. "Don't wake him! Let him rest."

"Good, because I don't think I can move anyway."

"Here."

Sabo holds out a hand, and Lami takes it, letting him pull her to her feet. The dizziness and fatigue surge up again, but the heat from his hand seeps into her own skin and grounds her to reality.

* * *

It’s barely a day after the events of Dressrosa that the newspaper reports begin flooding in. The headlines splash the front pages in bold – all commenting about _The Kiss_ and _The Alliance_ – and the accompanying pictures are all the same. Luffy, smiling that wide, white grin of his as he pulls Law down for a kiss. And Law’s own face – his head is thrown back in a full laugh, the likes of which were rarely seen by anyone – except maybe his little sister, and the Heart Pirates. And more pictures of the two of them engaging in some admittedly passionate lip locking.

And that’s all it takes for the endorphins to fade.

A little bit worried, but mostly irritated, Law entangles himself from the rubber octopus he’s sharing a bed with, and stumbles into the bathroom, parking himself squarely on the edge of the bathtub, his hair mussed and his clothes crumpled. Lami’s standing by the mirror and rubbing some kind of peach-scented lotion into her arms and legs, but she doesn’t seem mad at him for not telling her about his relationship with Luffy, which he takes to mean as a good sign.

“We good?” Law asks anyway, just to be sure.

Lami barely glances up from the task at hand, but he can see the tiniest curl to the edge of her lips in the mirror. “I liked _The Strawheart Alliance of Love_. The pictures in that article were pretty good, too.”

And Law knows that all is right in the world.

After glancing at him with a knowing smile, and raising up a shield of Calm after taking in his desperation ( mostly for some peace and quiet, which Bartolomeo's ship so rarely provides its occupants ), Lami resumes staring at herself in the mirror, pursing her lips and rubbing the scars on her arms self-consciously. Her hand comes up to her hair, or what’s left of the thick fall of golden waves — the fire that had ravaged half of Dressrosa, and Doflamingo’s strings had left her with a choppy, uneven mess that she’d been forced to let Nico Robin cut – and she smoothes down the hair that now falls to her shoulders.

“I look awful,” Lami admits, with a small, strained smile.

Law comes to stand behind her. She is not the mirror of him — that would be their father, now deceased — and yet when the two of them are put side by side, there are definite similarities. It’s not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers their intelligent grey eyes.

Never one to mince words, Law tells her honestly, with a flick on her nose to boot, “That’s a lie, and you know it.”

Lami giggles, perks up a little even, and his heart swells with love for his little sister. She turns to him, her face flushed and her eyes bright. “I made a new friend,” Lami says proudly. “In Dressrosa. We talked while you were sleeping. He’s nice.”

“That’s good,” Law says approvingly, a hint of surprise flavouring his tone. Admittedly, he isn’t too happy at the idea of her having a _male_ friend, but he can’t bear to quash her happiness now. “Who is it? Anyone I know?”

Lami runs the tap and washes her face with a foam of soap. Law hands her a towel, and as she rises from the cloud of it, she says, with a bright, beaming smile, “Sabo.”

“What?” A little distracted with the bubbles still clinging to the edge of her jaw, and more focused on getting them off her face with the pad of his thumb, Law doesn’t quite catch the name that Lami’s just blurted out. And when he does, it takes it about five seconds for it to sink in. _“What?”_

“Sabo,” Lami repeats obligingly, casting him a look of puzzlement. “Chief of Staff from the Revolutionary Army? Luffy’s older brother?”

“Luffy’s older brother,” Law repeats, feeling a little faint. He tries to tell himself that he won’t end up charred to a crisp by the end of the day. “Right.”

* * *

Trafalgar Law knows he should be happy for his sister. The only friends she’s ever really had outside of her illustrious career as a pirate are all _dead_. Also, perhaps considering the same fact that she’s a pirate, her options for friends _are_ rather limited, but if Law’s being honest here, he’d have preferred her making a friend from a _small_ , _quiet_ village, instead of rubbing shoulders with the _Revolutionary Army’s Chief of the General Staff._

Doflamingo’s defeat makes Law’s heart feel lighter, manages to restore some light to once dull and deadened eyes, but has the opposite effect on Lami by wearing her down, and draining the energy from her. Sabo works his magic by building her up. It becomes a habit: when the Den Den Mushi rings like clockwork in the evening, Lami flies from the dinner table and wraps a Silent bubble around herself and the receiver. Law studies his sister and picks at his food, occasionally smacking a rubbery appendage away from his plate, hearing nothing but the scrape of cutlery on plates, and the occasional bellow of laughter that comes from eating with two boisterous pirate crews. And then Lami emerges from her cocoon, flushed and glowing, the smile on her face bright and unmistakable. Every time it happens, Law can’t stop staring. It is not that Lami is so beautiful, although she is; it’s that he never really let himself believe that he would see her all grown up.

Law’s never eavesdropped, at least not intentionally, until the night that he hears the door to his bedroom creak open. He’s always been a light sleeper, and the phantom squeak of footsteps on wood is enough to rouse him from slumber. He tenses in Luffy’s warm, rubbery arms, but softens when he sees that it's his sister. The silvery moonlight makes Lami look like a marble statue, pale and ethereal; she hesitates by the doorway to their quarters for a minute, before coming to a decision and tiptoeing out into the hallway. She forgets to close the door; Law hears more creaking, and the rustle of fabric, and imagines her sitting cross-legged on the wooden floors.

“You awake?” Lami asks, taking care to keep her voice low.

Law hears a pained groan, and the low baritone of a male – he assumes it to be Sabo – floats out the mouth of the Den Den Mushi. “I am now.” Sleep slips away from him, like a shawl falling to the floor, and his voice is instantly alert. “Is it Luffy? Is something wrong?”

“No,” Lami admits, softly, so softly, that Law has to strain his ears to hear her. “It’s me.”

Sabo’s voice softens, takes on a fuzzy dreamlike quality. “What’s wrong?”

“Bad dream. The usual,” Lami whispers, and Law can hear her sigh, quiet as the breeze. “My brother was . . . Busy.”

“He’s currently in bed with mine, you mean,” Sabo says dryly. “You can say it. You’ve told me worse before.”

_How much worse?!_

It’s enough to rouse a watery laugh out of Lami. “Sorry for calling so late. I . . . It’s just –” _I used to wake my brother up, but I can’t now._ “– I wanted to talk to someone. Everyone else was – Unavailable.”

“Alright.” There’s a short pause. “Luffy used to get nightmares too.”

“He did?”

Law glances down at the sleeping face of the boy in question, Luffy’s mouth hanging open, a river of drool turning the pillow beneath his face damp. He’s been on the receiving end of one of Luffy’s nightmares, held him through the night, patting and soothing as best as he could while Luffy shook and cried, muffled, heart-breaking sobs.

“Yeah, kicked and screamed in his sleep lots. Woke me and Ace up a couple of times.”

Lami asks softly, “What did you do?”

“I used to tell him stories. Ace would kick Luffy to be quiet, but not after he let him into his bed. Luffy would nod right off after.”

“I see.”

There’s a moment of silence – Law wonders if both of them have drifted off, but then Sabo starts to speak again. There is some movement; Law imagines Lami shifting about on the floor, trying to get comfortable, maybe curling up over her stomach and resting her head atop her knees. He wonders if Sabo is imagining the same, somewhere.

“Once upon a time, there was once a prince who lived in the land of meat. Now, in all the land, there was only one fork, for the prince to eat his meat with. But he wanted a spoon, and so, the prince set off on a journey.”

“Thanks, Sabo,” He hears Lami murmur, in a voice thick with unshed tears.

He doesn’t stay awake long enough to hear if Sabo replies.

* * *

He wonders if all brothers feel like this the moment they realize their sisters are growing up – as if it is impossible to believe that the dresses she once wore were doll-sized; as if he can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the sidewalk. Wasn’t it yesterday that her hand was painfully tiny, barely able to hold her ice cream cone steady? That same hand was just holding his, tugging so that he might stop and see the plush toy in the glass windows, the rabbit-shaped cloud floating on the breeze, any of the thousand moments she wished she could freeze?

"Lami?"

Law stops her as she's leaving the too-crowded dinner table, and she turns to look at him, her eyebrows knotting together.

"Yeah?"

Swallowing, Law asks, "Are you happy?"

A pause.

"I'm getting there."


End file.
